Commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19

On April 19, the Congress for Jewish Culture, along with Friends of the Bund, Jewish Labor Committee and Workers Circle, will once again observe the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It's always a moving event, with music and speeches and fellowship. The event is usually held at the stone in the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza (der shteyn), in Riverside Park.

But because we cannot gather at the shteyn this year, the event will be live online, at the Congress for Jewish Culture website  and at its YouTube page. The program will begin at 1 p.m.

...I've written about cinematic and documentary depictions of the Warsaw Ghetto here, and about the ghosts of the former Ghetto, here.

Adapting Jewish Literature: Yentl and A Tale of Love and Darkness (video)

"Without hubris you will never be an artist..." -my teacher, Ruby Namdar

Last week I had the honor of joining Ruby Namdar, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Eitan Kensky for a delightful and thought provoking discussion of Yentl and A Tale of Love and Darkness. The video of that event is now available to watch.

Many thanks to Stanford University and Moment Magazine for inviting me and making it happen.

The Lives and Legacies of Jewish Women Who Resisted the Nazis (video)

I'm pleased to say that video is now available for the live webinar I moderated on the role of Jewish women and resistance. 

Wagner College professor Lori Weintrob led the program, called "Heroines of the Holocaust," based on her research and teaching at the Wagner College Holocaust Center. We were also lucky to have a survivor named Rachel Roth and her family as special guests during the program. 

It was a really special program and I hope you'll watch it.

Jewlia Eisenberg and the Music of the Spheres

(read more about the new-old Yiddish rituals of mourning in my latest column) 

A few days ago we got the terrible news that Jewlia Eisenberg was avek in der eybikayt, she had passed into the next world. It's always a tragedy when someone is cut down in their prime. It hurts even more to lose an artist like Jewlia. More than just talented, she was a force of nature; a holy vessel of song; a generous, optimistic, expansive soul. I felt so lucky every time I got to be with her. My heart and my thoughts are with her partner, AnMarie, and the rest of her family....

I had first seen Jewlia and Charming Hostess at Tonic, some time in the early 2000s. I was immediately smitten with her, her music, and the incredible musicians she worked with. I had never heard anything like this. I didn't even have the words to describe what they were doing. How often can you say that?

On one of Jewlia's visits to New York she visited me at the law firm where I worked. This was probably sometime around 2014 or 2015. We had lunch in the fancy firm cafeteria, sitting by the wraparound windows, where you could eat your panini and enjoy the view of Fox News HQ. I remember Jewlia telling me about her work as a ritual facilitator and officiant in the Bay Area, a world away from midtown. Though I rolled my eyes at the thought of getting too into god, by the end of our lunch, I was making plans to fly to Oakland just to be able to pray with her and her khevre.  

Even after we had become friends, I remained a dedicated Jewlia superfan. I was sitting front row, of course, at this 2013 show at Barbes, where I took this picture.

Jewlia at Barbes in 2013 

Jewlia was one of the very first artists I profiled as a journalist. I wrote about her in my Rootless Cosmopolitan column in Jewish Currents in 2006. (Apparently not available online)

I'm still trying to get my mind around losing her. I knew she was sick and had been for a very long time. And yet. In a year which has seen such unbearable loss, losing Jewlia feels especially unbearable.

How painfully apt then, that my last column ended up being delayed, coming out the day after we learned the news about Jewlia's passing. The topic was the one year anniversary of the pandemic, and Yiddish rituals of grief and mourning. For this column, I learned about the skilled mourning women of Ashkenaz, the klogmuters, who wailed and ripped their clothes and performed grief for the community. I interviewed my friends who are researching and reclaiming the practice of feldmestn, the ritual measurement of a graveyard with string and use that string to make neshome likht (soul candles). 

Like the badkhns, the klogmuters' wailing work consisted of variations on established themes and set patterns. With her work as a ritual facilitator, and her interest in women's poetry, I think Jewlia would have been fascinated by the functional poetry of the klogmuters. All we can do now, though, is wail in her memory, the best we can.

This Song is Your Song

Today we had our event celebrating the new Yiddish translation of Woody Guthrie's classic ode to America, This Land is Your Land. I joined Forward Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren and Forverts writer Jordan Kutzik, along with musician-archivist Lorin Sklamberg, translator and Yiddish expert Michael Wex, and the singer of Dos Land iz Dayn Land, Daniel Kahn. We had a really fun conversation about the why and how of translating from English into Yiddish. If you couldn't make it live, you can watch the video now.

The funniest part, for me at least, came when I noted that in the Yiddish translation, Daniel had inserted a reference to the groyse ozeres, the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are, of course, one of America's natural wonders and a perfect fit for a song like This Land is Your Land. But it also struck me as a very personal reference to Daniel's homeland of Detroit. Though I, a parochial New Yorker, confessed I had never actually seen any of the Great Lakes. At which point, Michael Wex chose to chastise me in front of the crowd, reminding me that I had been to Toronto (in fact, countless times) and had enjoyed walking along one of the Greatest of lakes.  Oops. To make up for my unintentional insult to the great nation to the north of us, I'll encourage everyone to listen to the folksinging group The Travellers doing their Canadian version of This Land is Your Land.

Of course, it's well worth your time to watch Daniel perform the song (again).

And finally, for the last couple months I've been OBSESSED with this extremely funky version of This Land is Your Land by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Sharon sings the verse that's often omitted, in which the singer comes across a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign (and walks right past it). If you've never heard this version, PLEASE drop everything and listen right now.

 

Guns, Ghosts, and Girls: All About the Yiddish Love Song

Do you believe in ghosts? I'm open to convincing, but the only proof I'll accept is when (not if) Leonard Cohen's ghost pays me a visit to whisper sexy ghost things by night. And, with all due respect, sir, I've been locked in my apartment for 11 months. What are you waiting for?

Leonard Cohen singing I'm Your Man is surely responsible for at least 55% of the unrealistic heterosexual expectations held by women across the world. Not that I hold it against him. Unless he wants me to.

For my column this week, I took a look at some of the best Yiddish love songs, with picks by me, as well as a couple of my esteemed friends. 

What exactly is a love song, anyway? One of my favorites has always been Nellie Casman's Yosl, Yosl. In it, a woman is waiting for her lover, Yosl, to make up his mind. Yosl, that cad, is taking his time, while in the meantime, she's being married off to another guy. But our narrator cannot get Yosl out of her mind. 

Baym trinken, baym esn, ken ikh im keynmol fargesn/Yosl, du ligst mir nokh in zin

(While drinking, while eating, I just can't forget him/Yosl, you're always in my thoughts)

If you've ever felt your very life essence trickle away as that special someone took their time to realize you were perfect for them, if you've ever had occasion to unironically say to someone ikh krapir nokh dir (I'm expiring for you) well, you may relate. But is it love? Now, some 20 years after first hearing it, I wonder if Yosl is even a real person. Maybe Yosl is a Fight Club style figment of the narrator's fevered imagination? Let's be real, some of us are just addicted to the drama.

 

.......

Another friend named Oy Avram as a favorite love song. It contains one of the best (and most over the top) images found in Yiddish song:

Oy, Avram, ikh ken on dir nit zayn!
Ikh on dir, un du on mir
Iz vi a klyamke on a tir!
Gedenkstu, gedensktu, oyf dem bulvar
Ikh der kluger un du der nar?
"Oy vey, Rivkenyu, gib zhe mir dayn piskenyu!"

Oy Avram, I cannot live without you
I without you and you without me
Is like a doorknob without a door!
Remember the day on the boulevard
I was clever and you were silly?
"Oy vey, Rivkenyu, give me your lips!"

I didn't have enough room to include what is perhaps my all-time favorite version: the hair-metal triumph of Yiddish Princess:

.....

Two of my respondents named In Droysn Iz Finster (It's Dark Outside) as their favorite Yiddish love song. My friend Sarah Biskowitz, a senior at Smith College, described her very sweet association with the song:

"My favorite Yiddish love song is In Droysn Iz Finster because I remember the TA Allison Posner and RA Adah Hetko singing it during the Steiner summer program 2018, where I started learning Yiddish. While it may be a romantic love song, it reminds me of the camaraderie and warmth I have found in the Yiddish community thanks to my teachers, mentors like Allison and Adah, and friends." Awwwww. That made my cynical heart smile.

You can see Allison and Adah perform it together here (with English subtitles):

......

When I was at the YIVO summer program in 2019 Lorin Sklamberg taught us a song from the Ruth Rubin archive, a real heartbreaker called Mayn Harts, Mayn Harts.

Mayn harts, mayn harts veynt in mir,
Az ikh darf zikh sheydn itst mit dir;
Mayne gedanken – ahin-aher,
Mit dir tsu sheydn iz mir shver.

My heart weeps within me
Since I must now part with you. 
My thoughts - this way, that way, 
To part from you is terrible.

I dare say the words aren't so different from many other love songs. But there's something about the tune that elevates it to extraordinary. Lorin and Polina Shepherd sing it on their gorgeous new choral (and more) album, 150 Voices. You can see them perform it live, here:

 

But if I can be a little pushy, allow me to give you a firm push toward the Ruth Rubin archive where you can hear the journalist Israel Freed sing an unaccompanied version, which Rubin recorded in 1967. This is taking nothing away from Lorin and Polina, but I've listened to Freed's recording at least 15 times in the last few days. There's something about it, the depth of feeling both in the melody, and his stunning performance, that just pierces me right through....

.......

In my column I made all too brief mention of Shtil, di nakht iz oysgeshternt (Quiet, the night is full of stars) as one of my favorites. It's one of those songs that can still get me choked up: the subject, the imagery, the tune, everything. The song is credited to Hirsh Glik and celebrates one of the female fighters of the Vilne Partisans, Vitka Kempner. It's quite possibly one of the only Yiddish songs in which learning how to use a gun figures prominently.  

Shtil di nakht iz oysgeshternt
un der frost hot shtark gebrent,
tsi gedenkstu vi ikh hob dikh gelernt,
haltn a shpayer in di hent

The quiet night is full of stars
And the frost strongly burned;
Do you remember how I taught you
To hold a gun in your hand?

The Wikipedia entry on the song cites folksong collector Ruth Rubin on another interesting aspect of the song's imagery. It uses three different Yiddish words for weapon: "shpayer (a local word from Vilnius), nagan (a Russian term referring to Nagant M1895), and pistoyl (a German term) – to denote an automatic pistol. Perhaps this was meant to show multiculturalism of the region."

There are many fine versions of Shtil, di nakht but this one by Daniel Kahn and Sasha Lurje just rips my heart in two.

Whew.

..........

To end on a lighter note, I'll close with two songs about the marriage of Yiddish food and Yiddish love. First, one of my favorite albums: the bawdy songs of a certain Goldie Schwartz, aka Patsy Abbott. Pretty much every track on Patsy's Yiddish Songs Mama Never Taught Me is gold. And many (most?) touch on matters of the heart (and lung, and liver, and other body parts.) But if I had to choose one to close with, I'm going with Mein Butcher. I can't even begin to translate the lyrics (both single and double entendres), but the gist is, all the ladies go to this butcher. His meat is extremely satisfying and he even throws in a little "bone." I think you get the picture.

dzstein · 10 Mein Butcher

And what comes after you visit the butcher? Why, the brisket, of course. Here's Rick Moranis* singing about his mother's legendary brisket. It's the sexy, jazz-y, lounge-y tribute that shabes dinner always deserved.  (*Honorary English language entry)

It occurs to me that just as kids never want to hear what their parents had to do to bring them into the world (ewwww!!!), perhaps it's in poor taste to put the neighborhood butcher in such close proximity to a beloved mama's brisket. But you didn't come here for good taste, anyway, did you??? In other words, I wish you all a lovely Valentine's Day, no matter how you get there.

On Wandering - New Podcast Episode Out Now!

Wayyyyyyy back last spring, Clarissa Marks asked me to be a guest on her podcast On Wandering. Though we recorded months ago, luckily, almost nothing has changed between now and then (LOLSOB). 

We talked about going from 0 to Weirdo as a born-again Yiddishist, how I started writing cultural criticism, and the secret to getting your creative projects done. Clarissa is a wonderful, thoughtful interlocutor and it was a delight to spend time with her. Hope you'll check it out!

Salomea Perl Book Talk This Spring at YIVO

One of the pleasures of my work is discovering and sharing new Jewish art and culture. In the case of The Canvas and other stories, the new translation of Salomea Perl's Yiddish stories, it's a new-old discovery. We finally have all of Perl's exquisite Yiddish stories gathered in one place, a hundred years after their publication. And we have a brand new translation by Ruth Murphy, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition, making it perfect for those who want to work on their Yiddish reading skills with the aid of simultaneous translation.

I wrote about The Canvas in my recent column on the Jewish obsession with genealogy. Perl herself was writing at the time Sholem Aleichem created his mytho-genetic family tree of modern Yiddish literature. He named Salomea Perl's erstwhile friend and publisher, Y.L. Peretz, as the father on that tree. But Perl, who eventually fell out with Peretz for unknown reasons, received no such mythologizing. As far as we know, she only published seven Yiddish stories in her lifetime, and after her death, they fell into obscurity.

After publishing the column in which I talked about The Canvas, YIVO asked me to lead a conversation about it, and the literary life of Salomea Perl. It's going to be on May 25 and because it will be online, there's no excuse not to see it. We've put together a fantastic group of folks for the talk: Canvas translator Ruth Murphy, literary scholar Justin Cammy, and master teacher of Yiddish literature, Anna Fishman-Gonshor. See you in May!

Adrienne Cooper Legacy 'Dreaming in Yiddish' Award 2020

In just a few weeks we will be celebrating at the 9th annual Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Memorial Concert and Award. 

The Dreaming in Yiddish event is something I look forward to every year. It's an evening of poetry, theater and music in the memory of our dear friend, colleague, and mentor, Adrienne Cooper. The Award is a sort of combination MacArthur Genius and lifetime achievement award for folks in the prime of their careers. The program is unlike any other award ceremony you've ever seen, and never fails to bring me to tears.

I'll admit, I'm especially excited because this year, the award is going to my very dear friend (and sometime gay Hawaii husband), Shane Baker. I'm thrilled to say I was invited to speak about Shane and the important work he does.

I want to encourage all of you to buy tickets to this year's award ceremony and concert, which will be on Sunday, December 27th at 8:00 p.m., live streamed from the Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.  Dreaming in Yiddish will be part of the Yiddish New York festival program, and you can buy a one night pass to YNY, which includes admission to the DIY concert live stream. Or, you can donate to the Dreaming in Yiddish fund, via PayPal link here or mail a check to GOH Productions, 309 E. 4th St. Suite 3B, NY NY 10009.

Every donation goes directly to the Dreaming in Yiddish fund. All funds raised are given to the award recipient, enabling them to pursue a project which might otherwise be financially out of reach. Too often, when an artist passes, we lament that they were not celebrated while they had a chance to hear it. The DIY award is our chance to support the very best of our community, and our chance to celebrate with them.

Oyneg Shabes Kveln

This is a story which spans two New York summers. If you’ve ever spent a summer in New York, you know that the humidity is inescapable and tends to color your perceptions. 

 

In the summer of 2019 I was at the YIVO summer program where I took a literature class with Miriam Trinh. There we read a poem by Celia Dropkin which had the title Du kvelst, ikh kvel or You Swell, I Swell. In it, a woman addresses her lover. Nail my hands and feet to a cross, she says, consume the whole of me. 

 

The poem is full of startlingly erotic imagery and it got me thinking about the Yiddish verb kveln and its American afterlife. 

 

Kvelling has become the quintessential Yinglish verb, signifying everything cozy and right within the American Jewish habitus. 

 

But when I looked up kveln in the dictionary, I found that the verb contains two distinctly antithetical connotations. The first relates to swelling or gushing, either literally or figuratively. The second means to torture or suffer. Kveln (to kvell) is in fact a contronym, a word which comprises two opposite meanings (other examples in English being cleave and sanction.) This is because Middle High German, the precursor language to Yiddish, contained two distinct, differently spelled words, one relating to water and swelling, the other related to torture and pain. By a linguistic quirk, these two different words ultimately merged into the Yiddish homonym, kveln. 

 

In Yiddish, both meanings of kveln are utterly commonplace, and can be found everywhere. But in English, the second, more uncomfortable kvel is entirely absent. The fact that there’s a popular Jewish parenting site called Kveller (with no asterisk to disambiguate this kvell from its evil twin) speaks for itself.

 

In February 2020, Kveller dedicated a whole article to the art of kvelling. 

“Kvelling is not boasting or bragging; it’s quieter. It’s the pride you feel when you witness your older child patiently helping the younger one finish a puzzle. It’s also the satisfaction you feel because it means they might have been listening to you after all.” But kvelling isn’t limited to your own kids. Kvelling can be communal: seeing a bat mitzvah girl at the bima or a Jewish celebrity being excellent in the public eye. A good kvell is low key because it avoids attracting the attention of the evil eye (ayin-hore.)”

 

Now, let’s go back to Celia Dropkin’s Du kvelst, ikh kvel

 

Du kvelst, ikh kvel.
Es kvelt in undz der got,
Vos makht fun alts a tel,
Vos veyst nisht fun farbot.

(You swell, I swell
Within us swells a god
Which makes of everything a ruin
And knows nothing of forbidden.)

 

The narrator of the poem asks her lover to nail her to a cross, to consume her, to suck every drop from her and walk away. 

I wrote about this dimension of adult kveling in my Valentine’s Day Golden City column this year

In American-Jewish English, kvell has been shrunken down in connotation, reduced to taking pride in one’s children or its association with motherhood more generally. But as we see, Dropkin infuses kvel with a much more primal vulnerability, one in which kvel can mean an uncontrollable gushing, of desire, of emotion, of the stickiness of human procreation. Kveln also carries this paradoxical second meaning, to torment or torture, introducing a masochistic question to the verse.

  

How then to translate Dropkin’s ‘kvel’? For my own translation, I liked the mamoshesdik (substantial) quality of ‘swell.’ But even ‘swell’ loses the erotic dampness of kveln’s connotations of ‘gushiness.’ I was sad but not surprised when I saw one male translator had gone with ‘overjoyed’ for Dropkin’s ‘kvel’. With all due respect, not every Yiddish poem must be rendered safe for the front of the family fridge.

 

Which brings me to the Summer of 2020. Whether you were listening to the radio, or right wing talk shows, everyone was suddenly talking about gushiness. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion had dropped their single called WAP. The “radio-friendly” edit  of the song changed the words to “Wet and Gushy,” perhaps the only cleaned up single version to end up that much filthier than the original.

 

The nation’s (mostly male) pearl-clutchers were predictably alarmed at two women insisting on their own pleasure, and profiting from it, to boot. 

 

Dropkin, too, had her share of pearl-clutchers. Reviewing Dropkin’s sole published collection of poetry in 1935, the most important literary critic of the day, the writer now known as Samuel Charney dismissed Dropkin’s work as insufficiently political: “it irks me that [Dropkin] included in her books things that were important only for her, and not for the reader.” Even Charney, a sensitive reader who himself pioneered a Yiddish literary theory which centered female readers, even he could not imagine the female readers who would find female pleasure “important.” 

 

Dropkin’s vision of the feminine kvel was, to say the least, ahead of its time, unlimited as it was by male, or American, ideas of propriety, literary or otherwise. Her poetry imagined a female subject whose kvel was not passive, not centered on the achievements of her family, or her community. Dropkin’s kvel was a messy flood of feeling which could not be contained by either pleasure or pain, one which, you might say, demanded a bucket and a mop. If, as Kveller tells us, anyone can (and should) master the art of kvelling, Celia Dropkin challenges us to expand the boundaries of the word itself. I would suggest that this must include taking Yiddish seriously as a Jewish language, making sure students in Jewish schools have the resources to study it if they want to, and ultimately, to reclaim the mess and contradictions of Jewish-American life which defy translation.